Of Marriage and Mystery

The first time I set eyes on my husband, he was leaning against a marble pillar in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He was wearing a tuxedo and his hands were in his pockets and when he smiled, I pushed my hair behind my ears.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked, and I was, in fact, but for reasons that still elude me, I shook my head. You, I thought inexplicably. I’ve been looking for you. I felt like a star that had spun into some predestined orbit, and though we didn’t even meet again until many months later, I always think of this as the moment our marriage began.

When we finally did exchange vows some years later, my sister went around the reception with a video camera, asking all the other married couples how they’d known they met The One. One couple said their moment struck in their high school French class when he tried to impress her by saying, “How unfortunate,” in French only to have it come out, “What cheese!” Another couple, the parents of four children, got into an on-camera argument after he confessed he couldn’t remember their first date.

Yet another couple, married for decades, told two different stories simultaneously. An aunt of mine looked for a long time at my uncle and finally said, “His smile. He had a nice rack of teeth.”

Every moment was different, and every story seemed to have a back story that nobody had quite yet figured out. The impression the tape left--and still leaves--is that we haven’t the faintest idea why one person falls for another, and that we’re even more mystified when it comes to why we stick around.

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Sticking around, a.k.a. marriage, is one of those questions that, like wedlock itself, ebbs and flows. Some years, everyone you know seems to be pairing off to make a life; a few years later, everyone you know is unmaking everything.

Some years, your anniversary comes and goes without so much as a lunch at Denny’s, you’re so distracted; some years, you look up and discover a whole new spouse. My anniversary is this week. On the day my husband reported that he’d made reservations for us at a nice restaurant, someone on our wedding video called to say it was final: She was now divorced.

Pensively, I opened Time magazine, and there was more on the state of the union--on one page, a review of a new book much maligned by anti-divorce activists called, bluntly, “Should You Leave?” And on another, a piece on those Promise Keeper guys, whose reply to the book would probably run along the lines of, “Only if you want to fry like a Jimmy Dean pork sausage in Satan’s omelet pan.” There were references to all the big public-policy flash points--gay marriage, covenant marriage, broken marriages in which the other woman gets sued.

What a difference between the micro and macro. You forget that there are people out there who can invest even the seven-year itch with political import, who can load even the heart’s orbit down with too much gravity.

It was hard to imagine that this public debate over the Future of Marriage had anything to do with the future of the marriages of anyone I knew. Something was getting lost in the translation, something private and profound.

The public policy folks seemed to want to legislate something. But how can you legislate the very moment when you feel your life being remade? How do you codify that poignant juncture when you decide that you are not only a couple, but also friends? How do you measure the accumulation of detail that binds you--the houses, the pets, the children, the dirty dishes, the bills? How do you parcel blame for the disconnected places inside you that wound and isolate and push you apart?

The political side of the story seemed tame and trivial compared to that other story, that back story that nobody has quite yet figured out. The impression it left was of someone trying desperately to impose order on a chaos of speeding celestial bodies that now were spinning, now falling, now sticking around.

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A friend recently passed on a quote--he thought it was from Clarence Darrow, the great lawyer--that has become my new favorite take on wedded bliss. Marriage, as Darrow reportedly saw it, is a “contract for companionship.”

On the day I fell in love, I probably wouldn’t have bought this, but after three kids, many house payments and innumerable shared crossword puzzles, I gotta admit, that take on the situation sounds pretty accurate.

Except . . .

Except that when I think of that smile in the hotel lobby, or smile back at it in the morning, or think of the friends whose contracts for companionship, even now, are being made and unmade, that description only sounds like half of the picture. That other half, well, that’s a mystery.

And if the smart people on our wedding video couldn’t put their finger on it, then, dear anti-divorce activists, I wish you luck. All I can tell you is, it appears to have something to do with chaos and order, with falling stars and rumpled tuxedos and good dental work. And, oh! Don’t forget the fromage.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com